SOURCE: "Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, September, 1945, pp. 368-90.

In the following excerpt, Caponigri analyzes the development of Brownson's Transcendentalist beliefs.

The career of Orestes Brownson possesses a unique interest for the student of American civilization. Alone of all the figures intimately associated with New England transcendentalism, he took the road to Rome which so many of his European contemporaries were taking. By what course of thought did he find himself compelled to take this step? The initial interest in this question is increased immensely by even a partial answer; for a cursory examination of his thought, in this connection, yields indubitable evidence that Brownson entered the Roman Catholic Church in the belief that it held the answer to the fundamental problem which he had found implicit in the whole Protestant tradition from which he came: the problem of...